Views Of My Garden this Morning

This is the "heather garden" I began last Spring.  The heather turns yellow green in summer and then red orange in the fall.  At the back is the purple smokebush.  I have some day lilies there to the right.  I have mixed in sedum (green and yellow Angelina) and pink creeping phlox to give the bed some color "pop".  It isn't much and there is little maintenance but the results are so much more than the effort involved.  I love this little bed.

Here is another plant that has been moved several times.  I think it has finally found it's "spot".  Bergenia.  Pig Squeak.  It got it's piggy name because when the leaves are rubbed they give off a sound very much like the sound pigs make.   Bergenia puts up a flower spike in spring of the nicest deep pink flowers.  Quite a nice thing to happen here at the corner "of nothing happens in Spring". This is the area in from to the front porch.  The tall plant to the left is a pussy willow and behind that is a pair of Maidenhair ferns.   A nice shady area.

Here is the shed.  Looking quite British and neat at this moment in time.  Riley actually tried to get into every picture this morning.   We have bearded iris (given to us by someone who decided she didn't like them), Jacob's Ladder (variegated), to far left is a Japanese white lilac tree and to the very far right is a Beach Plum in it's second year with us.   It just finished showing off a million or so tiny white flowers.  I planted magenta SunPatients in the window boxes along with orange flowers.  So far, nothing.  We'll see what happens.

Here is the Herb Bed in the vegetable garden.  To the left you can see the escaping spearmint.  Feverfew is the white daisy.  Borage is the plant with the fat leaves.  Lavender in the large pot at the left back next to a David Austin Rose.   I have dill, calendula and caraway to the right.  Lots of thyme creeping about in front of the lavender pot.

Hard to take good photos in the morning sunshine.  Better to do it in the late afternoon.   The shed came out best as it is in the shade in the morning.

My knee hurts today because I knelt in the garden Saturday planting the last of the seedlings.  It looks like it will be very hot today so I am happy to be having a day off.  We seemed to have sold every thing worth having yesterday at work---so today the trucks will be bringing in replacements.  I hope I get a full order of the herbs I need.  Everyone wanted rosemary.

This happens every year.  They want rosemary around Father's Day and we have NONE.  Then, later, we have tons of it and well, the customers bought it elsewhere.

PBS had a very disturbing new mystery on last night.   The Escape Artist.  I loved the "look" of upscale London and the insides of expensive homes but the meanness of the murders?  I find it hard to comprehend the sickness of people who do these things, even though I read mysteries with gruesome murder in the plots.  It's harder to "see" the murders on the screen I think.

We had lovely baked potatoes, grilled steaks and roasted asparagus for Father's Day dinner yesterday. Our daughter purchased the food and dropped it off Saturday night as her gift for her dad.  Our son called and had a nice long conversation with G while he was walking Riley.

Riley found something VERY disgusting to roll in and there after got three complete baths (under protest) until he didn't smell like anything.  There is the great divide between dogs and G and I.  Dogs like smelling really, really bad.